[mpermar]

Awesome story.

I'm not sure if this is just my personal feeling but I would say that stealing intellectual property was sort of common at that time. Open source was not widely known, knowledge was scarce, communities were just ramping up and really anyone with lack of principles could pretty much steal anything and get away with it.

It happened to me a few times with online content I wrote. Essentially tutorials, articles, etc. around Open Source. Once my own company sent me a newsletter which contained one of my articles signed by another employee from a different place. It felt pretty weird.

[peterkelly]

The article says the story was from 2005. Open source was very much widely known at that time. Linux was 13 years old by then, and Sun themselves open sourced both DTrace and Solaris that same year.

[mpermar]

Widely known... by a few techies. Well, certainly many more than in 1995, right? But can't compare those times to these days.

[BlueTemplar]

More than a few "techies", around here at that point software licenses were already part of the mandatory undergraduate "computer literacy" course...

[anthk]

You must be young. Everyone on IT/CS related knew about Linux/BSD and the GPL2/BSD licenses.